I was fortunate enough to receive a CR-48 from Google last week.  My impressions of it are more or less in line with what MG Siegler over at TechCrunch has reported:  good battery, nice screen, light weight laptop.  The only problem is that I have needed to adjust my workflow when I'm working on my regular computer, a Macbook Pro to facilitate sharing documents between the two machines.  For example, I have migrated away from OmniOutliner to a comparable online version, Workflowy.

The other major change is that my keyboard habits are changing.  With only a weekend usage of ChromeOS I already prefer having the caps lock key replaced with a button to open up new tabs in my browser.

When I got into work this morning I immediately missed my new favorite key.  I decided to try and figure out a way to replace this missing behavior.

A recent article outlines how to turn the caps lock key into a control, option or splat.  One benefit of an Apple approved method is that the keyboard caps lock light disables itself when you change the functionality.  A never ending flickering green light would have been a constant annoyance for me.

This approach isn't enough, I wanted more - to be able to open a new tab in Chrome.  I found the PCKeyboardHack preference pane/kext.  Using the instructions provided I remapped the caps lock key to F14, or keycode 107 on the slim apple keyboard.

Now that it was remapped to a real keyboard code it wasn't difficult to change the new tab shortcut in chrome to respond to F14.

These changes work on the laptop's keyboard in addition to the external keyboard and I'm very pleased with the results.
  • Tags: